The Last Book Party(49)

I pulled the clips and ribbons from my hair and tossed them into a corner. Lacing my fingers in Jeremy’s, I lifted our arms up in the air. I moved my hips closer to his body. The music was loud; there was no conversation. Our brows got sweaty, our faces flushed. The crowd around us became a blur, the people and their costumes irrelevant.

When the music slowed, Jeremy pulled me toward him. My head on his chest, I closed my eyes, breathless from the dancing and dizzy from the drink. I let myself relax in his arms as we moved in small circles around the porch. After a few minutes, I looked up at Jeremy, expecting to meet his eyes. But he was looking at something across the porch. I followed his gaze.

Tillie and Lane made an odd tableau, swaying their bodies to the music, their eyes locked, Tillie in her eighteenth-century finery and Lane a sleek Holly Golightly. Tillie held up a cloth napkin and Lane clasped the end of it with her long fingers, turning her body beneath it and stepping in and away like in a Greek dance, until Tillie pulled it taut and drew Lane closer to her. They never touched, the napkin keeping them apart, but the raw intimacy of their dance, between them as a pair, was palpable. Others were watching them too, slowing their own dances and backing toward the edge of the porch to cede the floor to Tillie and Lane.

There was no mistaking this declaration. This was not just a light flirtation; this was far more serious. I had never seen Tillie look at Henry the way she was looking at Lane, and had never seen Lane look so sincere, or so beautiful. They were connected in a way I had never imagined. They were in love.

Henry stood alone by the screen door, watching his wife dance with Lane, and it was obvious that he saw their love too. Henry’s arms were limp by his side, the tips of the fingers of one hand holding a small notebook that looked as if it was about to drop to the floor. I assumed this was where he had recorded his guesses of everyone’s costumes. Henry’s eyes shifted around the porch, not seeming to focus on anything or anyone. At this moment, Henry didn’t look middle-aged. He looked old.

Watching Tillie and Lane, it started to sink in that Henry and I had been played for fools. Tillie’s coolness to me may have been genuine, but it had also served a purpose. Without the burden of worrying about Tillie’s feelings, I had been free to become the distraction that Henry wanted and, more important, that Tillie needed him to have so she could tend to what had been brewing with Lane. Poor Henry. He had thought that he was the tortured one, that the only ambivalence to resolve was his own. What he’d probably thought had been a reconciliation with Tillie that morning I’d found them amicably doing the crossword, a coming together, or at least a coming to terms, after another meaningless summer dalliance, had perhaps for Tillie been a fond farewell. A last burst of companionship, or love, before making her break.

Henry must have sensed people looking at him. He flipped through the pages of his notebook as though he was searching for something in particular. He looked up and right at me, but without recognition or tenderness. At that moment, I understood how deeply Henry loved his wife and how lost he would be without her. All along, the stakes of what we were doing had been so much higher than I imagined.

“I need some air,” I said. I walked out of the porch and across the back lawn to the Adirondack chairs by the tennis courts. Jeremy followed.

“I am such a fool,” I said, dropping into one of the chairs.

“You mean about Tillie and Lane? How could you have known?”

He sat beside me. I let him think that the revelation of Tillie and Lane’s relationship was the only thing troubling me.

“I never would have guessed either,” he said, “but it does explain why Tillie and Henry both seemed so strange this afternoon. I thought it was me, but I guess they’ve been having a difficult summer.”

We sat in silence for a moment, until Jeremy said, “There’s something I have to ask you.”

Oh God, I thought, he knows about Henry.

I took a deep breath and waited.

“Who are you dressed as?”

I had forgotten about my costume, how carefully I had chosen it. I had first considered dressing as Zuleika Dobson as soon as I had finished the book. Henry and I had put our work aside to recite to each other our favorite lines, Henry’s in a laughably bad British accent. At first, I was reluctant to dress up as the coquettish Zuleika. It seemed too daunting and presumptuous, a step too far, but after everything that had happened with Henry, my confidence had grown and I had warmed to the idea, not only as an inside joke that would please Henry, but because I wanted to play a femme fatale. It would be the perfect climax to my summer, not only to attend the book party, but to be beautiful and elegant and bewitch the guests as Zuleika would. I told Jeremy about Max Beerbohm and the Edwardian heroine of his satiric novel.

“Zuleika Dobson? That’s the first I’ve ever heard of it. I doubt anyone will guess that one,” Jeremy said.

“Henry would have figured it out,” I said, and sighed.

“Would he?” he said, sounding a bit wary.

“It’s one of his favorite books—he talks about it all the time,” I said quickly. “It’s not Zuleika he loves; it’s Max Beerbohm. He idolizes him: his wit, his satire, his Britishness. Anyone who knows Henry knows that.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness—for Henry as much as for myself. The past few weeks had been so incredible, so liberating. It had made me so happy to make Henry laugh, but also to make him gasp with pleasure. I had known it would end eventually, as sure as I had known the days would get shorter and the nights cooler, but to see it end like this, so unexpectedly, and with Henry so dejected, and so unaware of me, felt hurtful and wrong. Feeling as if I might cry, I told Jeremy I had to find a bathroom.